The Bob: Impudent Ass or Impertinent Clown?

I know: where's the complementarity principle when you need it?

But if we are to go boldly where no cosmic flowchart has gone before, it must "account for all that, in principle, is knowable to man," and "in such a way that [it] cannot be refuted by evidence" (BZ).  

A tall order no doubt, but then again, is it asking too much to be given a reliable map out of this desert bewilderness? All men look for it, it's just that most either pretend to have found it or give up early for an untroubled life of tenure, or of sensory and affective distraction. 

My feelings are not irrefutable -- sad! -- but this is something I strongly feel: that if we are created, then we are entitled to know why. This is not because I am an impudent and presumptuous ass, but because God presumably isn't. Of course he wants us to know what's going on. Why otherwise would he give us an intellect (not to mention other vertical courtesies, e.g., revelation)?

Every other sense and faculty has an object: colors for the eyes, sounds for ears, tastes for the tongue, nausea for the Tony Awards. Thus, being for the intellect; or intelligibility for the intelligence. 

Now, Christianity per se is not the map I have in mind at this early juncture. We need to draw a distinction between theology and metaphysics, just as we need to draw one between metaphysics and science. However, none of these can contradict the others: a map of California does not contradict a map of the U.S., nor a map of the U.S. the globe.

Unless you pretend California is the world, which is almost as stupid as pretending science is metaphysics or theology.

Here are a couple of allied aphorisms: on the one hand, -- and this will sound hyperbolic, but it's true -- 

Why deceive ourselves? Science has not answered a single important question,

and

Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to meditating on minor problems.

But while science doesn't answer any important questions, it assumes a host of them, for example, that reality (or Being) is, that it is intelligible, that the human intellect has unique access to this intelligible being, that the world is lawful, that knowledge is an adequation of mind to world, etc. 

As for why these are the case, science can't say, and simply beclowns itself when it tries. 

We are all for scientific law, so long as you don't attempt to enclose it in the Law! Otherwise you can expect a late-night knock on the door by Sheriff Gödel. 

As for the second aphorism, why not skip over the minor problems and instead start with the big ones, or even biggest? Who knows, maybe if we sort out the Big One, the little ones will solve themselves, or at least not be so annoying. 

Also, FWIW, ever since my mind came on line, I've always had this idea that people focus and obsess over trivial things so as to defend themselves from awareness of the elephant in the unconscious. This is just psychotherapy 101, except that I extend this idea to the upper vertical. 

In other words, just as there are a host of defense mechanisms to keep the demons at bay, there are a variety of means to keep God from bothering us. 

In fact, often the same mechanism does both, and I speak from personal experience, just as you and anyone with a bit of self-awareness will understand what I'm talking about from personal experience.   

Self-awareness. What a thing! Friend or enemy? Gift or curse? All we know is, it is here, and it is very much like the adequation of mind to world, except it reverses its gaze and looks at the interior world. And what does it find? 

For starters, a world. An intelligible world? Yes, but it's bit of a Jung-le, isn't it? Moss covered archetypes everywhere!

Some passages stick with you, and I wonder why? For example, this one, from a book called Man, the Measure of All Things, by Sri Krishna Prem:

From the beginning of time men have sought the solution to a three-faced mystery: the mystery of origins, the mystery of present being, and the mystery of destiny.

Check. This guy's been reading my mail!

Usually their search has been directed outwards amongst the data of sense experience; backwards into the apparent certainty of the accomplished past, forwards in speculation into the indeterminate future. 

Yes, I remember. Good times! 

Only very rarely some wise man seeking Deathlessness, with reversed gaze has seen the inner Self, the Self who is 'Lord of what has been and is to be.'

I'll have some of what he's smoking. Go on:

What has the Self, the mysterious root of human consciousness, got to do with cosmogony, an account of the origination of the material universe?

The Question of questions, and sometimes there is more Light in a good question than in any answer we could provide. This isn't one of them, for I wouldn't be blogging about this if there weren't a plausible answer -- you know, the one to which we are entitled. Unless we are just impudent and presumptuous asses.

To be continued.